A trendy Mayfair coffee bar, SHOT, is currently selling the most expensive cup of coffee in the UK which will set you back £265 a cup.
The coffee is made using topica beans shipped in from Japan's 'island of eternal youth' and baristas at the shop says it's ordered around 2-3 times a week.
Obviously this is hateful, thinking of people spending that much money on one cup of coffee when the list of social goods they could do with that money is so very, very long.
And there's literally no way that coffee is ever going to taste 50 times better than a regular cup of coffee from a regular chain.
It's probably just the extreme rarity of the bean that pushes the price up so high, rather than it being particularly good!
SHOT has three branches in London, but actually on digging around I'm half sold on making a trip there to try out just an ordinary coffee, which costs around £10.
That's a lot of money for a coffee, even if it is decent, like the reviews suggest.
I'm not completely put-off trying ONE coffee from there, but wha is off-putting is that you just know the crowd in the shop is going to be HIDEOUS. Trendy young hipster types from wealth no doubt.
And I can just imagine the barristas having a touch of Orwell's waiter in Down and and Out....
If they sniff a hint of your being working class, they'd look down on you, despite being of the same class themselves.
I can't imagine myself getting on that well in such a shop, I just wouldn't feel comfortable enough to sit down and enjoy the coffee for 20 minutes or so.
As a final word I think it's just so obvious this is about conspicuous consumption, about showing how much money you've got to waste or demonstrating you're mastery of coffee culture.
It's certainly about more than enjoying a cup of coffee or getting a perk.
And I'm not paying £10 to bear witness to that sort of nonsense.
